The origins

Southern Harmony was compiled by William Walker.  We will be celebrating the beauty of its music and verse, as well as shining a light on the troublesome texts that, for good reason, did not survive in modern usage.  However, before we zoom in too closely, let's explore how SH and other "singing school" companions came to be.  I don't find it surprising that SH and similar tune books, with their penchant toward shame-based verse (which is largely the impetus for this project), are almost exclusively creations of Baptists in the antebellum United States.  

It is also fitting that this genre, rife with finger-wagging judgments about how people should think and behave, is a descendant of Baptists (certainly non-Catholics) on the other side of the pond.  The late seventeenth century saw polemics about whether it is holy to sing in church or not.  In fact, roughly 150 years before the publication of SH, the General Assembly of the General Baptist Church took up the issue in 1689 (the birth year of Bach, giving perspective on the primitive musical milieu that existed in the New World).  David W. Music quotes the minutes of that meeting, which state that the singing in church was "carnal" and "unwelcome" (Oxford Music Online).  

Coincidentally, 1689 is also the birth year of one John Tufts, born in Medford, Massachusetts, who bemoaned music illiteracy, and wrote the first textbook to solve the problem.  His An Introduction to the Singing of Psalm Tunes with a Collection of Tunes in Three Parts helped start a revival in singing (Foote, 99) to which the eighteenth century singing school is at least partially indebted.  However, for now, most General Baptists were still not singing in church at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and it wasn't until about 100 years later that most British Baptist Churches advocated for singing in worship (Music).

Tune books are not to be confused with hymn books, but it is difficult not to use the two concepts interchangeably, especially since the title page of SH references hymnals as sources for many of it's entries.  Collections such as SH were created for the teaching of music-reading, not for use in worship services, although George Pullen Jackson seems to indicate that such tune books were used in camp meetings (217).  Further, Eskew (1986, 24) reminds us that Southern Harmony, since it contained musical scores, was a companion to the predominantly words-only hymnals of the day.  

All but a small handful of selections in SH are religiously devotional, and the first section bears the heading, "Most of the Plain and Easy Tunes commonly Used in Time of Divine Worship."  As the Sacred Nine Project will highlight in its concerts and recordings, these selections were often so extremely dogmatic, that it is almost inconceivable that the values expressed therein were not deeply held sentiments of the singing school participants.  In short, although the shape-note singing was more recreational than religious (Eskew and Downey), SH was probably a good indication of what its singers believed.  Indeed, the hymnals from which William Walker gleaned many of his hymns were compiled by Southern pastors (Eskew, Christian Classics Ethereal Library).

The destination

While antebellum Southern non-Catholics were planting and plowing, they were also creating a fertile field for the singing school movement to really take hold.  The conditions facing a worshiper in the antebellum South helped endear the folk to this no-frills hymn singing style.  These were not sophisticated people.  Henry Wilder Foote discusses the deterioration of singing for these people. First, the settlers were more and more alienated from their English musical heritage.  Second, pioneer life did not afford the luxury of poetry and music. Third, their psalm books did not contain printed music, only text; even if there was printed music, there often weren't enough psalm books to go around.   Fourth, some pastors often taught the music by rote from their memory. (Foote, 90-95). 

Knowing these conditions, the music contained in these tune books seems right at home in the South, though it was a Bostonian who helped imbue the music with that American Medieval austerity.  Foote claims that Billings knew compositional rules, but ignored them because he was championing a new American music (116).  However, when comparing the Billings anthems in SH with other selections from the collection, the difference is stark.  In Billings, we see some attention to voice leading convention; however, many of the other hymns and songs in SH are orgies of parallel fifths, prodigal thirds, parallel octaves, curious doublings, and wanton modality, at a time when tonality had been de rigueur for over 200 years.  In fact, some part-writing is so recklessly clustery, that an uneducated musician (indeed, even the musically learned) would have been hard-pressed to sing it accurately.

SH melodies are often pentatonic and are always in the tenor voice. What also gives shape-note music its peculiar atmosphere are the unwritten singing conventions.  For example, the ubiquitous three-part notated texture is, in reality a five-part texture, as some women are (I use present tense, because this is still standard practice in Sacred Harp sings) expected to sing the tenor an octave up, and some men know to sing the treble an octave down.  In a minor key, the sixth would have generally been raised (Kiri Miller, 43), and because singing is a cappella and not preceded by the sound of a pitch-pipe, the hymns are rarely sung at the exact key indicated (Miller 94).

The singing school

The singing schools and shape-note tune books come to the South by way of the Northeast.  More than 100 years earlier, John Tufts, mentioned above, had advocated for a new way of singing: "by note, not by rote" (Foote, 97).  William Little and William Smith of Albany, New York invented the shapes (Eskew and Downey), which are a reboot of Elizabethan solmization (Harry Eskew, Christian Classics Ethereal Library), and are as follows:

triangle is "fa"

oval is "sol"

square is "la"

diamond is "mi"

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, singing school collections began appearing with these shaped notes, also called "buckwheat," "character," and "patent" notes (Eskew and Downey).  The singing school tradition started to remedy the low levels of singing literacy, and to quiet the "perceived chaos" of lined-out (rote) singing (Miller, 7).  The method taught people to sing at sight without having to read pitches and key signatures (Eskew and Downey).  

Instead of our "do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, and ti," the singing schools taught "fa, sol, la, fa, sol, la, mi."  A thorough explanation (the rudiments of music) appears at the beginning of these tune books in almost identical form.

The singing schools were popular in New England until the "finer" music of Europe was finding a place there, forcing these tune book sellers, with their open fifths and tenor melodies, to hit the road (Jackson, 16, Norton, 391).  Most of these tune book creators were from the so-called Southern Uplands (Bruce, 93).  Reading about this migration brings to mind visions of snake-oil salesmen.  Rural settlements were the market for itinerant singing teachers (Miller, 7).  Jackson quotes one Miss Augusta Brown, who asserted that people were being exploited by teachers who didn't know more than their pupils; she talks of a cobbler who also taught music (Jackson, 19-20). 

The conservative resistance

However, while church administrations tried to advocate for more sophisticated music, the southerners, who presumably would have been devotees of the singing school trend, resisted; there was a folksong movement on, and the people celebrated that (Jackson, 217).  In fact, Eskew explains that there are pieces in SH that were a marriage of hymn texts and secular tunes that were already established couples before its publication.  He goes on state that compilers like Walker newly paired secular tunes to hymn texts specifically for their tune books, and that Walker and his counterparts were often so intimately acquainted with the folk style, that they probably wrote new tunes in that idiom (Eskew, Christian Classics Ethereal Library).  Unfortunately, when flipping through the pages of SH, it is rarely clear who the arrangers and composers were.

If American Baptists are the spawn of their British counterparts, who were so resistant to something that seems as harmless (indeed, edifying) as singing in worship, what must the American Baptists in the South have thought about premarital sex, Catholicism, and race?  We need look no further than the hymns in the tune books, which are great sources for the study of antebellum Southern religion (Bruce, 92).  Southern Harmony is perhaps the chiefest among them.  For a discussion of SH and its creator, William Walker, navigate to the "revive" section.